Press Conference at LIGO HQ Announcing Unprecedented Discovery

youtube.com/watch?v=AFxLA3RGjnc&ab_channel=NationalScienceFoundation

better stream boys

alright coo' it was two neutron stars smacking into eachother

Aaaand its a neutron star collison

Optical signal! This is spectacular.

wow who gives a shit

>Veeky Forums - Science & Math

>gravitational waves
it's nothing, like always
fucking hacks

Are you even listening what the lady is saying?

>muh stronk independent wymen
back to reddiт

I wouldn't even respect this lazy bait with a (you)

Jesus christ those MILF aesthetics and the Italian accent are setting my dick on fire

I can't stand it.

>the radiohactive decay of this helement

vee-oh-lent-lee ee-yec-tid

>neutron star merger

I thought that gave off some deadly stuff that killed everything that could see it? Like star system-sterilizations for thousands of light years. Though, guess not, since we are still here.

why are shitalians such brainlets

>Hello, this is Bob from The Sun and I wanted to ask is this about aliens, thank you.

This is 130 million light years away.

Is that the same event? Why is it different from the eso stream?

This sure was unenlightning. What a waste of time.

Higher quality and it's way ahead

The papers relating to the detection have all been approved(that's why it was announce publicly), and should all be up on the arxiv by tomorrow. If you can't read and understand them, then that's what the plebstream is for. No shame in that.

...

Ah, so not even in our Local Group or remotely close to it. Well, the GCR event wouldn't even remotely reach us in any harmful capacity then.

As it was said, it was too far away from us to cause that.
GRBs need to happen nearby for extinction-level events.
Equally, it was also a weak angle that it hit us with.
We were on the fringes of its pathway.

The fact we've found these multiple sources for the same event across different measurement systems is the most amazing part.
They've all worked together to confirm a large number of things we expected and theorized on.
The sources of large percentages of all known heavy elements is now known.
We've finally WATCHED, not just saw for the first time, WATCHED, a neutron star collision happening and dropping off, in visual and gravitational astronomy.
Equally on that part, sync'd views of an event from gravitational measurement, which confirms LIGO does actually work. Gravitational astronomy is now official and not potentially unaccounted noise. This instantly ruled that potential out.
This really IS big news. And I'm not even a huge astronerd.

FUCK YOU

so where do they go from here? what can be achieved with that?

Not much. So exciting am I right?

Considerably more budgets for building new gravitational wave detectors for a start.

The rest is just confirmation of things that don't affect us much at all.
So yeah, Mind you, if it could get to the point where we can create a gravitational wave detector so sensitive it could be used to see incredible detail beyond the core of our galaxy, it would be rather neat.
We can only see behind it indirectly.

The two roles of experimental physics are to test the validity of existing theories, and to provide leads for new theories.
Most of the measurements verified the predictions for events that would accompany a neutron star merger: the gravitational waves fit the theoretical models very well, and a short GRB was also observed.
Things that don't fit the old theories were also measured: the short GRB was much less brighter than what you'd expect going by the theories. There are already several proposals for why that could be in the papers that will be published today.
More generally, the gravitational wave detectors are like a new kind of telescope that excels in looking at what lies in the blind spots of telescopes. They've already proven themselves with the direct detection of several black hole mergers, which could never have been detected optically. One Nobel prize was already given to the LIGO guys, and there are probably more coming in the future(today's announcement probably merits one as well, but further down the line).
t. post-doc working in the field

Validating an entire field of science is a pretty damn important thing to my plebeian mind.

This. Nobody cares. Come back to me when they find aliens.

I just read about this a bit ago. This is some really good shit. It's also cool that they're going to open up the alert system to amateur astronomers so more people can get in on the science.

the LIGO technology was developed in germany, the first demonstrator(GEO600) was also built there.

LIGO is a cooperation of 30 international institutes all over the world.

no

sites.google.com/ligo.org/ligo-scientific-collaboration/home

It's way more by now.

america

Do you have a disablity forcing you to talk in one-word replies?

no

How massive would 2 black holes merging together have to be to make a gravitational wave that could tear nearby matter apart?

3.5

Gravitational waves would never be enough to do that, I think. Nearby, tidal and radiative effects would be much more important.

I can't think of a scenario where that is possible. The more massive the merging black holes, the greater the wavelengh of the resulting gravitational waves. You'd need detectors hundreds or thousands of lightyears in size just to be able to measure them.

>can now measure distance independent of light
>can now see black holes being born
>possible insight into graviton particles
>benefits multiple fields of science
>creates general advances in computing, software, data analysis, etc.
>new spacecraft technology (for space-based gravity observatories)
everyone will benefit from this in general, but science will get the most benefit